The Big Issue Australia #640 – Cycles of Life

Ed.

640 09 JUL 2021

11.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

16.

CADEL EVANS

26.

and BLACK WIDOW

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Contents

EDITION

640

11 MY WORD

Peddling Magic Actor Samuel Johnson reckons his bike is his shortcut to freedom, and that his trusty treadly may as well have wings.

16 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

‘I Never Gave Up’ Tour de France champion Cadel Evans talks Tintin, the Dalai Lama, and the little things you mull over while taking a ride.

12.

Onya Bikes!

26

by Isabel Dunstan

It’s a cycling revolution! Riding’s fun, it keeps you fit and it’s good for the planet – we find out why in this brave new world, bikes are wheelie, wheelie popular.

cover illustration by Michelle Pereira @youngpapadum

THE REGULARS

25 Fiona 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews 37 Book Reviews 39 Public Service Announcement

Widow’s Peak Marvel’s long-overdue Avengers spinoff Black Widow boasts both brains and brawn, thanks to its Australian director Cate Shortland.

contents photo by Getty

04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor 06 Streetsheet 08 Hearsay & 20 Questions 20 The Big Picture 24 Ricky

FILM

40 Tastes Like Home 43 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click

Ed’s Letter

by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington

Feels on Wheels

LETTER OF THE FORTNIGHT

T

here is a freedom to cycling. That childhood thrill of wobbling away on training wheels for the very first time. That feeling of flying as you zoom down a hill, standing high on the pedals, wind in your hair. That sense of adventure as you discover the world, cycling through fields, forests, neighbourhoods. The liberation of escaping your house during lockdown.

It’s little wonder that, like Banjo Paterson’s famous Mulga Bill from Eaglehawk, we’ve caught the cycling craze during COVID. Bicycle sales are booming, and more of us taking to the streets on two wheels. The bike itself was born out of global calamity. German inventor Baron Karl von Drais unveiled his Laufmaschine – “running machine” – in 1817, as an alternative to horse-based transport. Two

years earlier, the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora produced a volcanic ash cloud so large it turned 1816 into the “year without a summer” – crops failed, food was scarce, livestock perished. While Drais’ original contraption lacked pedals and was deemed a public nuisance to pedestrians, it started a revolution.

Some 200 years – and several adjustments – later, we’re celebrating the humble bicycle, and those who ride, in this edition.

We also bid farewell to Books Editor Thuy On after eight years of revelling in her love for and knowledge of all things literary. But before she signs off for good, Thuy is set to judge our 17th annual Fiction Edition. Always a highlight on the Big Issue calendar, keep an eye out for it in late August. It will take you on a different kind of ride.

SCAN ME

Exclusive access to Big Issue video!

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

The Big Issue Story

04

Your Say

The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 25 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.

Coming out of Parliament Station today to a very cold dismal lockdown morning, I was greeted by a cheery Big Issue vendor wishing all passers‑by “good morning” and “have a great day”. I stopped for a chat and bought a magazine, then turned into Bourke Street and encountered another upbeat seller. “Would you like to buy a copy?” I replied that I just had. “No worries, thank you. God bless and have a great day.” I did!

ELIZABETH HEDGER FOOTSCRAY | VIC

Congratulations all on the 25-year achievement and on how wonderful the magazine is. I am a long-term purchaser and look forward to it every fortnight. Keep up the great work.

MARGARET FAIRHALL COORPAROO | QLD

So much to read in the 25th birthday edition. Congratulations for putting together such a great magazine. I enjoyed revisiting the history of The Big Issue – wonderful to read the vendors’ stories too.

KEITH MORRIS KENSINGTON | VIC

• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work.

• The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 23 locations around the country.

• The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales.

• The Big Issue Education workshops provide school, tertiary and corporate groups with insights into homelessness and disadvantage, and provide work opportunities for people experiencing marginalisation.

CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Elizabeth wins a copy of Nathan Lyons’ new cookbook Kooking With a Koori.

Enjoy his recipe for Curried Sausages on p40. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU

YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.

Meet Your Vendor

interview by Amanda Sweeney photo by Barry Street

PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.

09 JUL 2021

SELLS THE BIG ISSUE IN PADDINGTON AND COORPAROO, BRISBANE

05

Adnan

I was born in Tokat in Turkey. It’s a small, beautiful city and there are many mountains. I have two brothers and a sister. All my family still live in Turkey. I used to play soccer for my city’s football team.

I was the goalkeeper. Now I follow the Turkish football league – my team is Galatasaray SK. After college in Tokat, I went to a school in Istanbul to study physiotherapy. I was 22. Istanbul has so much culture; it’s a historical city. I worked as a physiotherapist in places like Dubai, Denmark and Russia. But my certificates are not enough to do physiotherapy in Australia.

I came to Australia with a tourist visa in August 2018 and then became a political refugee. One day I went shopping and saw someone selling the magazine. I asked him if it’s possible for me to do it. I came to The Big Issue office and on the same day I started the job. I felt excited, because in Australia it was my first job. I just worried about my English, but it was not a big problem. Now I’ve been selling The Big Issue for about 10 months. I have two pitches, Paddington and Coorparoo.

I think the customers are special people. Because they know it is not an ordinary magazine. This magazine supports the homeless and at-risk groups. Customers buy with this awareness. I have a large number of regular customers. I love talking to them. In these conversations I learned that a lot of Australians go to Turkey for vacation.

I love to hear good things for Turkey and Turkish people.

Before I came here, I didn’t know about Australian people. Now I like Australian people so much. Selling magazines has helped me learn how they think. They are very friendly, so relaxed. They are positive, not negative.

For me, the food is difficult in Australia, but I’m trying to get used to it. In Brisbane there are so many good Turkish restaurants.

I’ve also learned about other countries from my customers. For example, I speak to people from Africa and South America and Sri Lanka. Before, I hadn’t met people from these places, but in Brisbane I meet so many and I learn about their cultures. I’m a political man and I like learning about people. My customers are very interesting. I also like to read. I follow the news, not just from Turkey and Australia, but from around the world.

My biggest wish is that everything will be okay soon.

Everyone in the world must struggle for the end of wars, for children not to die, for the end of hunger, for peace to come.

Maybe I can do a second job soon. But I’ll never stop selling The Big Issue – because it is my first love in Australia. First loves are very special and never forgotten.

The memories and friendships I’ve made with The Big Issue are very meaningful to me. I love all my customers.

I pay my respects to everyone. I hope for a more livable and free world.

Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends

Tour de Force

VEND OR SPOT LIGH T

LENNY

LENNY: ONE OF A KIND

Electric Dreams

06

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

I

t took me about three months of 10-minute daily practice to feel confident enough using a unicycle for commuting. Holding on to the corner of a house, my attempts usually ended when I was breathless or bleeding. My first rides around the neighbourhood were exhausting, stressful and exhilarating at the same time. This was 12 years ago, and since then I’ve gone through at least half-a-dozen unicycles, lots of tyres and tubes.

Unicycling kept me in good spirits when the black dog of depression haunted me, and still does. Whenever I focused on my thoughts instead of keeping on top of the unicycle, I fell off. When I just cruised leisurely, I noticed the positive response of those I passed by. I rode on a wave of smiles, and mostly returned happily tired to whatever home I had, even while sleeping in my car.

After riding on one wheel for thousands of kilometres, I got a bit tired of Brisbane’s many hills. Two weeks ago, I got myself an electric unicycle. I paid the equivalent of selling 160 magazines to pick it up second hand. Biggest investment for me in a long time, yet the only thing I regret is not having it done earlier!

Everything I need to sell the magazine fits into a backpack, and I use my electric unicycle to get to work. Commuting has turned from an exhausting trip to a pleasurable adventure. Last week I made it to the top of Mount Coot-tha for the first time.

Luckily, I could use bike paths most of the way. The last bit to the summit was a bit scary, but the views over Brisbane were worth it. I had to take it slow, which makes it easier and more fun to take in the views. I can’t wait to go on another one-wheeled adventure.

LENNY AVID READER , WEST END I BRISBANE

I remember my first long-distance cycling effort, riding to Lake Moondarra, 17km north of Mount Isa, and then back another 17km, in the early 70s when I was a teenager. It felt great, a sense of accomplishment! Back then, there were no mandatory helmets, fancy shoes, fashion or protocols, and it took me about one-and-a-half hours to get there. If I’d walked, it would have taken me much longer! It felt good to explore the world around me and get away from the family house for a while.

Bike riders always love a tailwind as this pushes them to their destination faster; a headwind requires much more effort, and a crosswind can dangerously push you sideways into incoming traffic!

And don’t get too close to big trucks, as these behemoths produce their own wind force! If you’d like to know more about the joys of cycling, google “What’s so good about riding a bike?”

DEVO I EAST PERTH

Love My Regulars!

My favourite customers are my regulars who seek me out every fortnight to buy a magazine.

I appreciate all of my customers.

One of my best memories is when a customer gave me $100 in a card after I gave her directions to a few shops she was looking for.

Sometimes I will mind people’s dogs or bikes when they go into the shops to help them out, and people really appreciate it. I also like to pick up rubbish around my area to keep it clean and to help the community.

CHRIS SOUTHPOINT TUGGERANONG I CANBERRA

Hit the Brakes I bought a bike last year. About four months after I got my bike, I was put on ADHD medications, and the first day I started to take

PHOTO OF LENNY BY KYLIE KLUGER

Streetsheet

them I was surprisingly calm and focused. I decided to go for a ride as it was a sunny Sunday afternoon.

The day before, they’d been doing work on the bike path outside my house, making it all new, shiny and smooth. Because my brain wasn’t used to being able to focus, it had trouble prioritising what it should focus on, so while I was riding along the path, the only thing in my brain was how good the path looked! I neglected to notice where my bike was in relation to the good-looking path. My wheels hit the dirt and I flew about five meters and hurt myself! I broke my bike – I now have a scooter.

GRACE KAMBAH SHOPS I CANBERRA

Making Connections I started selling The Big Issue in 2007. I remember when I first started, on my first day, being really worried no-one would approach me.

I ended up having a really good day!

When I started, there were maybe four or five vendors in Geelong

and we got our mags from The Body Shop, which we still do, and some of the staff are still working there! They are a great support to us. I wasn’t selling for a few years; it was a really difficult time for me. When I returned to selling, it was an absolute joy to reconnect with my regulars. My customers are such a strong support for me and to be able to be back on pitch and interact with people again was brilliant. Connecting with people is the central part of The Big Issue for me. A special memory I have is giving a customer a Christmas card that she didn’t expect, and her coming back a few months later to tell me how much it meant to her – she was really thankful.

SHANE WESTPAC, MOORABOOL ST I GEELONG

Wheelie Good Fun Like many people, I learned to ride a bike when I was a kid, with training wheels and my fair share of scrapes and scratches. Once I was

out on my own, riding was the last thing I thought about, until 2010 when I decided to do more fitness.

I picked up bike riding again, as well as Community Street Soccer and a season of AFL. My favourite memory is doing three organised rides in Brisbane. I learned that while they’re great to do, for me they were also stressful. I still ride my bike as often as I can now. And I still enjoy it, even over a decade on.

CINDY BLACKWOOD, GOODWOOD & ADELAIDE SHOWGROUNDS I ADELAIDE

Pedal Power I’ve been to a few bike events in my time. I like riding with other cyclists, because I feel part of a group. My favourite was the Ipswich 100 – I do love a hilly course. I like the Brissie to the Bay ride too – it’s a fundraiser for MS. The team I was in raised the most money.

EDDIE MILTON MARKETS, INDOOROOPILLY STATION & SHERWOOD I BRISBANE

Keep the Faith My favourite cover is when Jon Bon Jovi was the star in Ed#575. He is my favourite singer and I have a laminated cover framed and hanging on my bedroom wall. We need more interviews with Jon Bon Jovi!

JB J, A DO SE OF GO OD ME DI CIN E

ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.

07

09 JUL 2021

CAROLINE LONDON COURT I PERTH

Hearsay

Andrew Weldon Cartoonist

“

I didn’t think I’d ever get to go up.

China’s President Xi Jinping getting all bellicose in a speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of China.

THE NEW YORK POST I US

“I say this humbly – but I’m as talented as fuck.”

Kevin Hart, the world’s highestearning stand-up, ain’t joking when it comes to his career.

THE SUNDAY TIMES I UK

Wally Funk, 82, (left) who is set to become the oldest person to venture into space when she takes off on 20 July in a four-person crew with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Funk was one of 13 women, including Rhea Hurrle (centre) and Jerrie Cobb, who trained as astronauts from 1961, in an unofficial program run by a NASA scientist.

THE GUARDIAN I UK

“If I went to university, I’d write a thesis about the male ego on Love Island. I’m really interested in the whole alpha male dynamic, and I’m going to sound like an absolute lunatic right now, but it’s like Deliverance, that pack mentality.”

Actor Margot Robbie on that duelling banjos vibe of TV dating shows.

08

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

VOGUE I UK

“It’s very rare to find a fossil like this, with a face in good condition.

You dream of finding this stuff.”

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks on the discovery of a massive skull that’s at least 140,000 years old and possibly a new species of ancient human.

THE NEW YORK TIMES I US

“People wanted someone to come in and heal this nation, not just from the pandemic, which I feel Joe did by, you know, getting shots in everybody’s arms. But also…he’s

just a calmer president. He lowers the temperature.”

First Lady Jill Biden, managing to make herself clear without mentioning you-know-who.

“There’s no Cosby reunion. There will be no Vegas residency and there will be no new Jell-O endorsement for Mr Cosby. He was not found innocent. He was released on a technicality. I would say the world still believes him to be guilty for the heinous crimes he was charged with and he’s going to live a very OJ Simpson-like existence for the rest of his life.”

Howard Bragman, PR strategist and crisis manager, on comedian Bill Cosby, who was released from jail after his conviction for sexually assaulting a woman was overturned on appeal.

VARIETY I US

“There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronised in time.”

Shannon Rausser, a researcher at Columbia University, on the linkage between stress and grey hair. Turns out even your hair needs that holiday!

“As a society, we have an over‑reliance on possessions...so when pandemics happen we have 20, 40, 60 years of learning that possessions make us feel safe, make us feel good. If we had less reliance on possessions we may not be in this position [regarding panic buying].”

Dr Melissa Norberg, deputy director of the Centre for Emotional Health at Macquarie University, on how capitalism is driving panic buying during lockdown.

SCIENCE DAILY I US

THE AGE I AU

“The Chinese people will absolutely not allow any foreign force to bully, oppress or enslave us and anyone who attempts to do so will face broken heads and bloodshed in front of the iron Great Wall of the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

“We were just having a rough time and were trying to cheer ourselves up. We had a great time with Mr Bird, he’s a great guy and no harm came to our friend.”

A note from The Big Bird Bandits Tasman Binder and Cody Milne, who

VOGUE I US

20 Questions

by Rachael Wallace

01 Who starred as Diane Chambers

in the TV sitcom Cheers?

02 A gas leak has sparked a blaze on the

surface of which ocean basin?

03 True or false? Babies are born

without kneecaps.

04 How many consecutive Wimbledon

men’s singles titles did Björn Borg win?

05 In what year was the Torres Strait

Islander flag recognised as an official flag in Australia?

06 What does the term “brace” refer

to in soccer?

07 As of June 2021, how many living

former Australian Prime Ministers are there?

08 What does the expression déjà

rêvé mean?

09 What is the connection between

Overheard in a suburban Melbourne kitchen.

ABC I AU

“Unbelievably, we saw two men sunbaking naked on the South Coast. They got startled by a deer, ran into the national forest, national park, and got lost. Not only did they require assistance from SES and police... They also got a ticket.”

Oh deer! NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller on two men who were fined $1000 each for getting buck naked and breaching lockdown rules.

CNN I US

“Our people’s hearts ached most when we saw [Kim’s] emaciated looks. Everyone says their tears are welling up in their eyes naturally.”

An unnamed North Korean man tells

Debbie Harry and Ted Bundy?

state-sanctioned TV of the reaction to footage of leader Kim Jong-un, who appears to have lost weight.

10 Who are Greig Pickhaver and John

AL JAZEERA I QA

11 Which country is the sovereign

“If you’ve performed regularly since you were young, gigs are like part of your total serotonal diet, like alcohol, a jog or having sex – your body gets used to getting its happy juice. It’s really hard being deprived of it; your hedonic cycle is dependent on that hit.”

Comedic minstrel Tim Minchin on returning to the stage.

THE TIMES I UK

“From a safety point of view, what we’re saying is they should think about not in exit rows because the dog could get in the way…and not in the aisles.”

Peter Gibson, a spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, on new rules that will let Australian airlines decide whether or not to allow pets in the cabin of the plane from December. Pigs might fly.

Doyle better known as? state of Gibraltar?

12 The record for the combined length

of longest fingernails on a pair of hands ever is a) 9.85m b) 7.75m c) 10.2m or d) 8.75m?

13 Who won Worst Actress at the 2020

Golden Raspberry Awards?

14 Phil Oakey is lead singer of which

English pop band?

15 What word precedes “bag”, “head”,

“tight” and “mail”?

16 Who was the flag bearer for Australia

at the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony?

17 What medical condition was

Samantha diagnosed with in the final season of Sex and the City?

18 What was the Penny Farthing

named after?

19 What type of beer is an IPA? 20 Who was Mary Mallon, born in 1869

in County Tyrone, Ireland, better known as?

09 JUL 2021

Maddy: Dad, are you a refugee?

Me: Nope, but my dad was. Why? Maddy: Cool, that means I’m half refugee!

have appeared in court in Adelaide charged with the theft of a $160,000 Big Bird costume – which was returned a few days after its theft caused a mighty flap.

3AW I AU

FREQUENTLY OVERHEAR TANTALISING TIDBITS? DON’T WASTE THEM ON YOUR FRIENDS SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD AT SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU.

ANSWERS ON PAGE 43.

09

EAR2GROUND

My Word

by Samuel Johnson loveyoursister.org

Peddling Magic Samuel Johnson rode around Australia on a unicycle to raise money for cancer research.

But his bike is more than just a mode of transport – it’s the wind beneath his wings.

M

y bike is magic. And it doesn’t need batteries because you don’t need batteries to fly a bike. It’s my short cut to freedom. My path to everywhere. It isn’t just a bike to me. It’s my most trusted and truest companion. It’s always there for me.

Never does it tell me what to do or where to go or how to be. My trusty bike might as well have wings because to me riding actually feels like flying. Who needs a magic carpet or a wishing chair when you can glide through the world on a treadly? And don’t get me started on whizzing down hills.

A particularly odd or vivid flower. A centipede. A noble tree. A previously undiscovered waterway. A good perch provides a chance to snack and appreciate the splendour. Curiosity leads me forward. I just love not knowing what’s around the corner. I’m always at the very beginning of learning how much there is to learn.

If I’m depressed and curiosity is too hard to muster, I revert to the left-right game. I pedal despondently, taking the first left, then the next right, and so on, until I find something that makes me feel better.

One time I was crying my way through my left-right game and I came across some kids playing soccer.

A stray kick resulted in an invitation to play and I ended up sharing a game and a laugh with some new little friends. As I pedalled home, I pedalled through tears of joy.

In 2014, I broke a world record for longest distance travelled on a unicycle. I rode nearly 16,000 kilometres on one wheel all around the country, at an average of 11.4k’s an hour. It took me 364 days. Along the way I raised nearly $1.5 million for cancer research

in the name of Connie, my cancer-riddled sister.

When you’ve pedalled for months on end, you eventually forgive yourself. We all know how hard it is to put the whip away. But I didn’t ride away from my problems. I rode through them.

Spending a year on a wheel opened up my whole life.

I went from the depths of shame to becoming Victorian Australian of the Year in 2018 and raising $13 million for cancer research. I rode my way to contentment. I rode until I found love. All of it. And I’m stupidly happy now.

So I ride on.

Samuel Johnson OAM is a Gold Logie-winning actor, 2018 Victorian Australian of the Year and the founder of Love Your Sister, a cancer-vanquishing charity.

11

The world is hurtling through the universe at incredible speed, but we can’t feel it – it feels still.

Unless you’re hurtling down a preposterous hill; then you’re holding hands with the universe.

A bike is not a thing to get from A to B. That’s what scooters, ride-shares, four-wheel drives, walking and public transport are for. Bikes are for the pioneers. The adventurers. The people laden with curiosity. Here’s the trick though: you have to know when to stop. When to get off the bike. Cos it’s not a destination thing.

I ride until I happen upon something worth stopping for – like feathers. Not any old seagull discard; no, it takes more than that, but an uncommon feather, however small, is enough to stop me in my tracks, especially a spotted feather – they really take my fancy. A good skimming stone will also do the trick.

09 JUL 2021

Curiosity leads me forward. I just love not knowing what’s around the corner. I’m always at the very beginning of learning how much there is to learn.

ONYA

BIKES!

In the wake of a biking boom, Isabel Dunstan meets the cyclists peddling their way through the pandemic and beyond – and learns what’s driving the two-wheeled revolution.

Isabel Dunstan is a writer based in central Victoria.

illustration by Andrew Cheung

12

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

@isabeldunstan

I

t’s summer in New York in 2020. The pandemic has gripped the city, and Aussie expat Olivia Parsonson is zipping around Central Park on her yellow 1970s Schwinn road bike. She comes out at 5th Avenue and has the street all to herself.

It’s usually bustling with business, and she’s travelling by subway train, but the public has retreated indoors. Parsonson,

in the bread business, is an essential worker. She has to travel from Brooklyn to Manhattan for work. “The whole of New York shut down,” she recounts over the phone. “The subway was empty.

No‑one was around. It was pretty scary, so I bought a bike.” She speaks lovingly of her trusty steed: “Her name is Bella.”

Meanwhile, in regional Victoria after lockdown last November, Kia Binch is

With exercise you get the endorphins, and then you get fit – and then you’re helping the planet too.

OLIVIA PARSONSON

In a workshop in the backstreets of Melbourne’s inner north, Huw Vellacott’s shop Commuter Cycles caters to everyday cyclists – the kind who hop on a bike to get to work, the pub or the gym. With such public spaces closed for much of last year, Vellacott worried that his shop’s typical customer would be working from home, and commuting less. But this was more than offset by born-again cyclists keen to get back on the road. “New customers would come in saying ‘Oh, I haven’t used my bike in a while, and it just needs a quick tune up,’ then we’d take a look at the bike and the thing has clearly been in the shed for years,” he says.

Meanwhile, the customers who’d normally get their bike spruced up for a perfect pedal to work were now spending up on bits and bobs that would allow them to go for weekend rides out of town: a lightweight tent, or torches and reflectors, for example. “COVID has been a bit of a nudge for people whose other options for travel are not available, like that trip to Europe is no longer on the cards.”

Bike sales are also soaring across the country. As Grant Kaplan, manager of bike store Giant Sydney, told The Guardian, “We’re the new toilet paper and everyone wants a piece. We can’t keep up with sales. Literally the phone is ringing nonstop.”

In April 2020 alone, 99 Bikes Brookvale in Sydney’s northern beaches reported an almost 30 per cent increase in sales on the previous year, telling SBS News they’d hired five new staff members to cope with the demand. While in the lead‑up to Christmas, bikes were selling out.

The Guardian reported some shops had waiting lists 50, 100, 600 names long, as supply struggled to keep up with demand.

While the boom in cycling has largely been driven by individual needs, the upshot is that it contributes to a cleaner, healthier planet. If the cycling boom continues, it could challenge Australia’s car dependency in ways that might seriously reduce emissions. As Alexander Miller reflects, “for environmental reasons, biking is

09 JUL 2021

We’re in the midst of a cycling craze like that of the late 1890s, when some 200,000 Australians bought a “safety” bike with its new-fangled air-filled tyres – replacing the notoriously dangerous penny farthing. The petrol-rationing days of World War II brought a second boom, the 1970s oil crisis a third.

Today, in the face of increasing uncertainty brought on by the pandemic and climate change, people are again taking up cycling in droves.

The Bicycle Network, Australia’s national bike advocacy group, found huge increases in bike path use between 2019 and 2020 – up to 270 per cent in some areas around the country. Cycling along Fremantle’s Leighton Beach has exploded – from an average of 250 riders a day on the shared path in 2019, to 740 a day in 2020. In Brisbane, innercity cycle traffic has almost doubled, and Sydney City Council reports an increase in cycle traffic despite an overall decline in people in the city.

“You can see so many more people riding bikes now,” says Alexander Miller of the Bicycle Network. “There’s also a great cross-section of society – different age groups, different genders and age groups that’s been a wonderful thing to see over time.”

In these pandemic times, it makes good sense. The World Health Organisation promotes cycling as a useful way to meet the minimum requirement for daily physical activity while maintaining social distance.

People are hopping on bikes as a fun and convenient way to keep mentally and physically fit and explore their neighbourhoods during lockdowns, while for those heading into work, cycling offers an alternative to public transport. Plus, with overseas travel off the cards for a while, more adventure-

seekers are packing their pannier bags and getting out of town on two wheels.

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35km into one of her first adventure rides – an overnight expedition across the Great Victorian Rail Trail. With the help of bike mechanic Wazza from Tallarook, she’s just MacGyvered her broken bike pedal with aluminium foil and is settling in to camp for the night. “It was the most satisfying feeling because I’d overcome so much adversity,” she remembers of the trip, “two punctured tyres included.”

HUW VELLACOTT

KIA BINCH

THE SWAG FAMILY

RIAL

All of this comes with a warning: you may get hooked! Just look at the “Swag Family” from Tasmania, who hopped on their tandem bicycles and embarked on an Australia-wide trip back in 2019.

It took Nicola and Andrew Hughes and their primary-school-age kids Hope and Wilfy a year to make their way up the eastern inland side of Australia, across the top and down through the middle of Western Australia. From Kalgoorlie, they travelled east across the Nullarbor Plain to Adelaide and they rolled on home to Tasmania after 348 days on the road and 14,000km in their tracks.

“It’s a pretty good lifestyle out on the road, even though it’s a bit exhausting,” says Andrew. “But then again it’s pretty exhausting being at home with the kids with an office job so you might as well take them on the road and have the adventure at the same time.”

They have their hearts set on the next big adventure, when they can travel more broadly post-pandemic.

“When we’re back home in Tasmania I think we’ll seriously start plotting the next adventure. It will probably involve bicycles, and it will probably involve other parts of the world.”

09 JUL 2021

Rial bought his first bike as the pandemic hit, after relocating from Melbourne to the goldfields region of Victoria. “I wanted to pick up a hobby that was a healthy distraction, and would take me away from people and into the bush,” says the primary school teacher.

This year Rial and his wife faced the tragic experience of a miscarriage.

Born many months too early, their baby, Ali, was buried in the cemetery close to where they live. Rial took time off to grieve, and sought solace in the distraction of mountain biking. “It was beautiful because I could ride, and then stop, and just listen to everything around me. It helped me connect with Ali. When

OLIVIA PARSONSON

I had that connection, I realised how much I love this,” he says.

Rial has since taken his mountain biking hobby to the next level, signing up for his first race. “Initially I went riding just for distraction, so that I didn’t stay at home and be sad. It wasn’t just a distraction; it made me feel good and more connected with myself,” Rial says.

“It makes me a better human being.”

Kia Binch echoes this sentiment.

Shortly after her solo adventure ride, she found her crew in Melburn Durt, an off-road cycling group that aims to empower women, trans and gender‑non-conforming people. Every week, she meets up with fellow riders for cyclocross, for muddy obstacles and fitness training that prepares cyclists for bike packing, or off-road adventure, rides. “Bike packing has helped my self-confidence; it’s made me more resilient. The day-to-day lessons that bike packing teaches you has helped overcome the uncertainty of periods of pandemic lockdown.”

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PHOTOS SUPPLIED

better. We know most car trips are less than five kilometres and transport counts for about 20 per cent of carbon emissions, and every kilometre you ride saves 240 grams of carbon.”

Olivia Parsonson is keenly aware of the positive impact her bike is having on the environment, and encourages others to find a trusty steed of their own. Now home in Sydney from New York, with Bella in tow, Parsonson has turned her attention to climate change, motivated by the heartbreaking loss of her family home in the Blue Mountains fires at the advent of 2020. She works for grassroots climate organisations and rides instead of drives. “With exercise you get the endorphins, and then you get fit – and then you’re helping the planet, too,” she says.

As the number of cyclists increases, so too does the demand for cycling infrastructure. The City of Sydney announced more than 10km of pop‑up bike lanes in May this year, while in Melbourne, 40km of bike lanes within the CBD have been fast-tracked.

Originally planned over the next decade, they will be completed in two years.

Parsonson hopes this increased infrastructure boost will continue, and encourage more people to get on bikes. “I think Australia has a lot of catching up to do. Sydney in particular is atrocious for bike lanes, so there is a real danger of being hit by cars and that’s stopping people from getting on bikes.”

I Never Gave Up Cadel Evans did what no Australian was ever expected to do: he won the world’s premier (and toughest) cycling event, the Tour de France. Yet winning is not what gave him the greatest satisfaction…

by Michael Epis

PHOTOS SUPPLIED AND BY GETTY

Contributing Editor

CADEL EVANS’ THE ART OF CYCLING IS OUT NOW.

09 JUL 2021

TOP: YOUNG CADEL, WITH HELMET BOTTOM: IN THE YELLOW JERSEY, HAVING WON THE TOUR DE FRANCE

a bike shop near my school, was a great help to me. He taught me little things I still remember now – 30 years later, they have stuck with me. Little things like making sure the sponsor’s logo is visible – I found myself doing that just the other day, adjusting my cap to make sure the sponsor’s logo could be seen.

I had a great upbringing, a great childhood. I was very lucky. Mum was a single mum for a while (then there was Trevor, her partner). I was an only child and Mum taught me so much. She always taught me to do things properly. Just let me read you something, over here on my computer, it’s a quote I put here about five years ago, from [writer] Clarence Budington Kelland: “My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.”

That’s what my mum did: set the example. I hope I’m the same way now: I have a seven-month-old, a two-year-old and a 10-year-old, and they give me so much satisfaction too. You know, you can tell your children all the right ways, but it’s the example you set that’s the important thing. You can’t tell them what to do with their life, but you can lead them to things. Mum always set a great example for me as an only child.

In sport you always have the next event, the next race, and that can be just around the corner, the next day, the next week, but after the peak, after you have reached the top, when it’s all over, you have to turn the page, you have to write the next chapter.

I still go riding now. The funny thing is I probably enjoy riding more now than I did when I was competing. When you are competing and you are number one in the world, people expect you to be number one every day: day in, day out. But it’s just not like that. It’s not. Some days you are tired, or grumpy or whatever. Whereas now it’s fun.

I ride around and people wave… Well, waving is more of an Australian thing, actually. I’m going off for a ride now, and I’ll probably think of some much better answers to these questions when I’m on my bike and reflective.

I always buy The Big Issue, but I haven’t been back to Australia since the pandemic started, so I haven’t been able to. I love it.

And the vendors always call me by my name; they must be cycling fans!

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I

look back at my 16-year-old self and I see someone who’s focused, ambitious, determined, but narrow-minded. Narrow-minded really just because of a lack of experience, a lack of exposure to the world and life experiences.

My advice to him would be to keep going and stay balanced. To really achieve, whether it’s in science, or medicine, or music or sport, you need to be single-minded, but you also need balance. It’s like Albert Einstein said – “Life is like riding a bicycle.

To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” And he was the most intelligent person in the history of mankind.

Balance is so important – balance in your diet, in your habits, in your work, in everything really. I was very lucky. I knew what I wanted to do very early on in life, which puts you on a path, puts you ahead of your peers, and in my case ahead of my competitors. For that, for knowing that, I am forever grateful. I have a jersey that I wear and it’s got those words written on it: “Forever Grateful”.

I never gave up – that’s the thing that gives me the most satisfaction, above all.

There are times when you feel like it, but after a while, when you have put so much in, it’s just not an option any longer. The other satisfying thing is I have had the opportunity to inspire people, which is way beyond anything that I had ever hoped for, than I ever imagined. That really is so satisfying, inspiring other people. It’s so much more than I ever expected.

My heroes are Tintin and the Dalai Lama. Tintin’s been my hero since I was a child and first read The Black Island. He was everything you’d ever want to be: intelligent, brave and strong. But if you are going to try to live like someone out of fiction, you might end up disappointed. And the Dalai Lama, he carries himself with more dignity than anyone else in the world and yet has reason not to [given his exile from Tibet, after the invasion by China]. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Buddhist, but the Dalai Lama…a great example, balance once again. I had the opportunity to meet him once and we spent hours talking, in an airport.

I was lucky to have some good people in my life. They might not have been the greatest riders, but that’s not the point.

Damian Grundy, my first coach, who owned

Pack Mentality Jenny Sinclair dons lycra and an open mind, surrendering to the Sunday morning call of the MAMILs and their peloton.

illustration by Nat Hues

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S

aturday morning. Beach Road, Melbourne.

Port Phillip Bay, to my right, is like a mirror made of polished steel. The date palms are black silhouettes against a pictureperfect dawn.

It’s a nice morning for a ride.

But this is not that kind of ride. This is not cruising gently along the separated bike path, up and down the ancient sand dunes. The only up and down here is head down, bum up. Because I’m in the middle of a pack of sweating MAMILs*, trying to keep up.

You’ve seen them: 20, 30, 100 riders, usually men, often dressed alike, turning the entire left lane into a river of bikes. And maybe you’ve wondered: what’s all that about? Let me be your spy.

I’m 55 years old, weigh a tad over 50 kilograms, and female. Which is to say, I don’t fit in. Some of these riders could be my kids – they’re half my age and twice my size and have a lot more testosterone in their veins.

But a bike’s a bike and if I really push the pedals, I can sometimes hang off the back of a not-too-fit bunch for a while. (Mostly I ride solo, but when the headwind is strong enough, I have no pride.)

And while I’m there, pretty much unnoticed, I hear

some stuff, though I hear less than you’d think about the bikes themselves – machines costing from $1000 to $10,000, uniformly clean and perfectly set up. But that’s not what this is about.

The peloton – any group of cyclists bunched up together, from the French word for “ball” – has a practical effect. It protects the riders from the wind, allows sharing of the lead, much like a flock of birds flying in formation. It also functions a bit like a school of fish: not so much in the aerodynamics as in the sheer mass. The whole appears as a large road user and, in that, wards off predatory cars, just as a school forms the shape of a big fish. This might be a reason for the dress‑alike habits of the riders. There is, as well, the motivation of keeping up with others. It’s harder to slack off if your mates are setting the pace.

All those are reasonable excuses for forming a pack of riders, I suppose. But there’s also this: at 30, 40, even 50 kilometres an hour in the middle of a group of riders, there is no room for error. You can’t listen to a podcast or think about your work.

You must – simply must – devote every neuron, every reflex, to calculating and maintaining the distance between your front wheel and the rear wheel of the bike in front. You need to be aware of the road, the wind, the tiny hand signals and calls of those around you, indicating hazards, cars up ahead or behind and their intention to pass, slow down or stop.

You have no choice, in other words, but to reach a state of flow, literally and figuratively, as the group rolls along the road. And with that rolling movement comes a particular set of sounds: 100 thin rubber tyres meeting bitumen, 50 sets of well‑oiled chains gliding over cogs, the occasional click and catch of a rider changing gears. There’s a hum, a hive-like feeling, a sensory immersion: sound, vision, scent and the underrated, haptic force of motion.

There is, in other words, a loss of self twice over: first to the task that takes all your focus, and second to becoming part of a phenomenon that – like the rustling of leaves in a tree, or the drumming of rain on a roof – is so much more than the sum of its individual parts.

This thing – being one of many, being alone in a group, being a fish in a school, a bird in a flock, a voice in a roaring crowd – it can be dangerous. But it’s something that we do, and even need to do, and that, I think, is what the peloton is really all about. * Middle Aged Man in Lycra. @jenny_sinclair Jenny Sinclair is a Melbourne writer and cycling tragic.

I

t snowed in Hobart the year I got my beloved Apollo. As a teenager, it gave me the autonomy to get around. I rode my second-hand bike to school and work.

When my parent’s car was broken, I went on a harebrained mission to my first paid-by-the-hour job at a mobile food truck in the Huon Valley.

Riding from Hobart to Cygnet was 55 kilometres, and I had to be there by 8.30 in the morning.

I got up at five and rode up the side of Mount Nelson onto the highway.

I threw up when I reached the top of the hill, dizzy with fatigue, but nevertheless triumphant as I pedalled along the strip of asphalt down the Southern Outlet and onto the Channel Highway.

I watched the mountain shrug its shoulders in my eyeline as I rushed down into the scrubby basin of Vinces Saddle, past the mountain peaks of Cathedral Rock and Sleeping Beauty.

With the freedom of my bicycle, I felt limitless.

I wasn’t restricted by the bus schedule. Beyond its labyrinth of one-way streets and peak-hour gridlock, Hobart can be traversed by cycleways that run alongside the old train tracks from the town centre to the northern suburbs, with bike lanes connecting the meandering highway to the southern districts. My Apollo could take me anywhere – as long as I planned enough time ahead.

Other than the drivers who threw the odd bottle, insult or handful of garbage my way, there was one problem – I had no idea how to fix my bicycle.

When I ploughed over a piece of broken glass on my way into town, I was stumped. I walked my injured bike into the city, the wheels catching on its deflated tyre. I knew the bike shop would offer me a discount on repairs but I wanted to know how to do it myself.

I headed to the Bike Kitchen, a shed full of old bicycle parts at the old Wilderness Society

@zowie_dk Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn has written for Overland, Meanjin, Island and others. She edits nonfiction for Voiceworks, and in 2018 she won the Scribe Nonfiction Prize.

09 JUL 2021

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn finds freedom comes on two wheels and a can of WD-40.

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A Chain Reaction

building in town. Every Sunday, volunteers teach people how to fix their bikes and to make new ones in the “kitchen”, a shed stacked with ice cream tubs of washers and gears and tubes. The shed sits beside an aisle of spoked wheels and curling handlebars hanging from racks full of frames, some bright and some rusting. The volunteers are called “bike chefs”, and they wear aprons and gloves.

I watched other cyclists fixing their wheels, different bikes being unmade and remade, until one of the chefs came to my aid. It turned out my wheels were tilted at a wonky angle, the tyre scraping against the frame. When the bike chef pulled out the ball bearings from inside the hub, I had no idea that tiny steel marbles were the things making the wheels tick. I learned what WD‑40 was for; I hadn’t realised that you had to oil your chain with RP7 to stop it wearing out.

In an ongoing cycle of renewal and maintenance, the Bike Kitchen accepts “anything that is going to contribute to putting a road worthy bike on the road...so a bike that’s no longer used, a bike that may have something broken that may provide parts for others”. When people donate whole bikes, they can be stripped for parts or passed on to a new rider.

Another Sunday when I visited, a man donated a flash racing bike, a woman dropped off a handful of inner tubes that had been sitting in her garage, and a teenager gave the Kitchen a pair of shock absorbers she’d bought before realising they didn’t fit her model. The racer went as a prize for a raffle to raise money for the Kitchen; I used one of the tubes for my flat tyre, punctured beyond repair; the next week, I saw a kid installing shock absorbers on the patchwork bike that he’d built from scratch using old parts.

One evening, my dear Apollo was stolen from outside the restaurant where I worked. I went to the Kitchen on the weekend and found a bicycle that someone had left behind the week before, red and silver with a maple leaf on the handlebars.

I rode that instead from then on, keeping my eyes peeled for the purple Apollo.

I never saw it again. It’s probably been painted over and sold on, or worse, twisted up and dumped in a skip somewhere. I like to think it might have found its way to a new owner who appreciates it as much as I did. I just hope whoever has it is taking care of it – and giving it plenty of elbow grease.

series by Kim Kyung-Hoon

The Big Picture

Cat Empire When his neighbours fled Fukushima’s nuclear zone a decade ago, Sakae Kato stayed behind to look after the cats abandoned in the disaster.

by Tim Kelly

Tim Kelly is a senior correspondent for Reuters.

09 JUL 2021

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COURTESY OF REUTERS/INSP.NGO

A

t 2.45 on the Friday afternoon of 11 March 2011, Sakae Kato’s life changed forever.

Seventy-five kilometres off Japan’s eastern shore, 25 kilometres below the surface of the water, two of Earth’s tectonic plates were pushing against each other, as they had done for hundreds of thousands of years. Then something gave way – and one of those plates slipped under the other one, lurching about 50 metres towards Japan.

The result, exacerbated by seabed ridges left over from earlier upheavals, was a tsunami. The fact that English speakers use the Japanese word for giant waves says it all. This tsunami reached the staggering height of 39 metres. About 20,000 Japanese who were alive that Friday afternoon had died come nightfall. Ten kilometres inland, sea water flooded homes. Japan had moved a couple of metres closer to China.

Sakae Kato survived the horror. A 47-year-old owner of a construction business at the time, his survival was all the more remarkable because he lived – as he still does – near the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

It was inundated with sea water. Its power supply was destroyed and its cores began to melt, as they belched chemical clouds.

Those who weren’t killed, fled. Those who couldn’t flee were evacuated. Most – more than 160,000 – have not returned. But Kato is going nowhere. Haunted by the dead pets he found around abandoned homes, he has made it his life’s work to look after the stray and feral cats that roam this desolate landscape.

“I don’t want to leave; I like living in these mountains,” he says, standing in front of what is left of his house, on land his family has occupied for generations. Its floorboards are rotted by sea water; its walls and roof are collapsing, buffeted by a tremor earlier this year. “It might last another two or three years,” he says, casting his builder’s eye over the damage. Not that it matters – he is not allowed to live in the house anyway, which is in a quarantined contaminated area.

Meanwhile, Kato goes on feeding the cats, and wild boar for that matter, much to the chagrin of the remaining farmers, who view them as pests. “I want to make sure I am here to take care of the last one,” he says. “After that I want to die, whether that be a day or hour later.”

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SAKAE KATO PLAYS WITH MOKKUN AND CHARM

TWO OF THE 41 CATS IN KATO’S CARE

NOODLES FOR DINNER

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09 JUL 2021

THE BLACK BAGS HOLD CONTAMINATED SOIL

Ricky

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The Tesla is a car designed by nerds, for nerds.

It’s like being inside a giant iPhone.

by Ricky French @frenchricky

They’re All Torque

M

y 14-year-old son is an expert on electric vehicles. He ought to be, anyway, considering how many hours a day he spends on YouTube learning about them. So it was easy choosing a present for his recent birthday. A $90,000 Tesla Model 3 (the long-range version, in case you’re wondering).

Unfortunately, I had to break the news that his present was only for 24 hours. Evee is like Airbnb for electric vehicles. Successful people who own an EV can hire out their car to people like us who can only dream. And so it was that we arrived at a very nice home to take delivery of a bright red Tesla for a day of futuristic, high-speed, non-polluting fun.

The Tesla is a car designed by nerds, for nerds. It’s like being inside a giant iPhone. No dials, sticks, buttons, levers or anything like that. Just a steering wheel and a touchscreen.

We spent the first hour working out all the functions. It has some impressive safety features, including cameras that keep you aligned in your lane while you check your text messages, but the feature we liked best was the fart button. And that’s not even a joke.

Because the Tesla was designed by nerds it has an option that you can select (and why wouldn’t you?) where it makes fart noises every time you indicate. Not just one fart noise, either, but a whole symphony.

When paired with the music of a heartfelt singer playing acoustic guitar, the farts that randomly interject while the singer softly croons were worth the hire price alone.

But really it was the famed acceleration we wanted to experience. Because I don’t understand anything about anything, I asked my son why Teslas are so fast off the mark.

“Because 100 per cent of the available torque is deployed instantly, obviously,” was his answer. Sounds legit.

What it means in real life is that when you put your foot down your entire body is pushed

back so hard into your seat that it leaves a permanent spinal imprint in the vinyl. We drove the Tesla to my son’s grandparents’ place and gave grandad a drive (please don’t tell Evee this). Grandad is a speed demon. He used to race motorbikes and he built an aeroplane in his shed. Cars have never really done it for him because they are clumsy and slow.

He sat in the Tesla’s driver’s seat and we told him to floor it, as if he needed prompting.

Four seconds later, after he had regained composure and reset his pacemaker, his appraisal was, “Bloody hell!”

That phrase could well be used to describe Australia’s slow uptake of EVs. Just 0.75 per cent of new cars bought in Australia are EVs, compared with about 75 per cent in Norway.

The Victorian Government recently whacked EVs with a hefty road-user charge, to be offset by a $3000 subsidy for EV purchases under $69,000. Across the border in NSW the government there has announced the same rebate, plus no stamp duty, and will delay its road-user charge until 2027 or until EVs make up 30 per cent of new car sales. It will also spend $171 million on new charging infrastructure (“range anxiety” is a real thing in the EV world, readers).

In the ACT you get two years’ free rego when you buy an EV, no stamp duty and interest-free loans of up to $15,000 to buy one.

And the Federal Government’s stance on EVs? Well, take a guess. They no likey.

Ironically, the PM’s tactic of appealing to the Aussie bloke’s love of macho cars to dismiss or delay the EV revolution could backfire. Footage of burly coal miners flooring it in a Tesla (“Bloody hell!”) has been a big hit on Twitter.

And just wait till they discover the fart button. The future is here.

Ricky is a writer and musician who is learning a lot from his son.

by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman

PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND

L

ight years ago I dated a man who refused to make a “home” for things like his keys and wallet, blithely putting them wherever in a fog of inattention.

Leaving his house, EVERY TIME, was a clown production of airborne cushions, clothes, bedding, bits of paper, dust bunnies, pets and crockery, as he searched and swore.

“For the love of God,” I would plead, “pick a place to put them. Anywhere. A saucer on your bedside table, a coat hook, a corner of the coffee table, submerged in a plastic bag in the toilet cistern next to your housemate’s acid. I am beyond caring you aggravating, aggravating man.” He could not and would not. We are no longer an item, the kicker being the time he had a doctor’s appointment and spent three hours upending the house in search of his Medicare card. The chaos made me frantic. It was an anti-meditation: every time I stayed over was the calming equivalent of thrusting my hand into a blender.

To be certain, we are all but one step from the abyss, but for me, getting through the day and remaining chipper is dependent on the charade that I am in control. To this end I have a strict “everything in its place” policy with regards to keys and other vital accoutrements, which works well, mmm, 80 per cent of the time. The other 20 per cent is spent thumping around our small house wondering exactly where I put my phone (four per cent attached by magnet to the fan hood over the stove where it lives, four per cent bathroom, four per cent a pocket, four per cent out near the chickens, four per cent random bullshit). But the system (mostly) works, so yay. That said, my main bulwark against the forces of havoc are my lovely lists. Lists, how do I love thee, let me count the ways.

One: dopamine. Or, to put it another way: yes, sex is good, but have you tried crossing something off your to-do list? Makes your eyes roll back in your head. The key to deep list

satisfaction is to ensure it comprises not just large unwieldy items such as “fix the rising damp” or “write novel”, but also small, highly achievable tasks such as “pay parking fine” or “wash hair”. Don’t make that face. They count.

They take time. And if they’re not on your list they either don’t happen, and you wake at 4am thinking, argh, that fine has totally been escalated by now, or you do them regardless and feel sad because where did the day go? I was going to write my novel. Put ’em on the list, factor them in, cross them off triumphantly.

Two: structure. My working life as a freelance creative is essentially a swarm of mosquitos fizzing around my head, many of them just ideas, and prioritising that lot inside my skull is not a thing. I drag them out, one by buzzing one, and nail them with a pen to a sheet of paper, peer at them, put them in order.

Then I can make choices. Otherwise, I’m just batting a whine of mosquitos away from my ears, not paying fines and hyperventilating.

Three: quantity as well as quality. Not meaning to skite, but my system involves five lists. Five! Getting shivers. Firstly, bog standard shopping list on the fridge (as a side note, anyone else always out of cooking wine?). Secondly, house tasks, such as de‑pooping the chook shed. Thirdly, Greg’s house tasks, ahaha, he doesn’t read it. Fourth, life/work, complete with subheadings such as teaching, writing and gigs, with sub-lists of “friends to see” and “shows to reschedule due to COVID”. (In times of apocalypse, I notice, nothing is ever truly completed.) Fifth, today’s list compiled from the master lists, arranged in order of “must-doage”.

Loving myself sick. Now, excusez-moi, I’m going to draw a line through the word “column”, and bask in that sweet, so very sweet, dopamine.

Fiona is an A-list writer and comedian.

09 JUL 2021

Play Listy for Me

Yes, sex is good, but have you tried crossing something off your to-do list?

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Fiona

Black Widow

Film SCARLETT JOHANSSON IS NATASHA ROMANOFF

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Widow’s Peak Director Cate Shortland is a marvel – she’s gone from indie films to a superhero blockbuster, delivering an action spy thriller that’s both complex and kick‑ass, giving Black Widow the backstory she deserves.

by Michael Sun @mlchaelsun

Michael Sun is writer and broadcaster who has been published in The Guardian, The Monthly, ABC Arts and more.

A

ustralian director Cate Shortland might not seem like the obvious pick to helm a Marvel tentpole, but then again, the superhero franchise is no stranger to unconventional, even outlandish choices.

Across a sprawling cinematic universe now heading into Phase Four – to use Marvel’s own terminology, which sounds ripped from a sinister sci-fi experiment – the studio has accrued a reputation for plucking indie directors out of festival circuits and endowing them with eye‑watering budgets.

There’s Taika Waititi, whose charmingly offbeat and extremely Kiwi sensibilities in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) lent themselves to the invigorating comedy of Thor: Ragnarok (2017).

There’s Ryan Coogler, who moved from acclaimed dramas around race and masculinity to, well, another acclaimed drama around race and masculinity: Black Panther (2018).

Shortland. “Part of that mystery was that people weren’t digging deeper and allowing her to show different facets of her character. What we did in this film was look at all of her, who she is as a person…making a whole character, a whole woman, and getting under her skin.”

And the mysteries run deep. Unlike the rest of her comrades, Romanoff – played by Hollywood A-lister Scarlett Johansson as something of a femme fatale – lacks the extraterrestrial powers of, say, Thor, or the futuristic full-body armour of Iron Man. Onscreen, she’s equipped with little more than her abilities – honed through years of covert KGB training, they serve her pretty well though.

Black Widow delves into those formative years – which belong to a past era, flecked by Cold War-era tensions – with investigative zeal. Think redacted intelligence documents, hammers and sickles aplenty, and grainy black-and-white footage that shows training camps lit by harsh spotlights.

09 JUL 2021

And who could forget the upcoming Eternals from Nomadland (2020) director Chloé Zhao, whose work to date – in all its slow-paced, golden‑hour glory – seems antithetical to the Marvel epic?

Shortland, then, fits naturally into this lineage with Black Widow – a blockbuster spy thriller that is less interested in conquests than characters, that strives to balance out brain and brawn.

“I think Kevin [Feige, head of Marvel Studios] wanted me to make a character-based film,” she reflects, speaking over a video call from California.

“He kept pushing me to make a film about community, about family, about heart.”

The result is a surprisingly rich study of its titular Black Widow: Natasha Romanoff, a superhero and founding member of the Avengers whose backstory has remained largely cryptic on screen, despite her appearance in a litany of other Marvel instalments following her 2010 debut in Iron Man 2.

“I think the fact that she’s mysterious, it just meant to me that she was under-utilised,” says

It’s an aesthetic choice that frames the film in militaristic undertones, but that also helps to excavate Romanoff’s traumatic upbringing, which is key to answering the million-dollar question: who is Black Widow?

“She has a lot of shame,” Shortland speculates.

“And I think many of us relate to that. She has a lot of masks up, because she’s frightened of showing her vulnerability, [which] comes from her childhood trauma. We wanted to take the mask off, and allow her to be vulnerable, and to know that she’s loved – that she’s actually part of a community.”

A rift divides Black Widow between her dual alliances: to a secret American counter‑terrorism organisation named SHIELD (a precursor to the Avengers) and to her estranged family, who may or may not still have ties to Soviet operations.

Through a series of flashbacks at the beginning of the film, we see Romanoff’s suburban upbringing in America with her father Alexei (David Harbour), mother Melina (Rachel Weisz), and sister Yelena (an extremely feisty Florence Pugh, Russian accent and all). But domestic life is not as it seems. Within minutes, we’re launched into a high-octane car chase, shootout and helicopter escape – a series of unfortunate events that sees the two sisters sent back to Russia.

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PHOTOS © MARVEL STUDIOS 2020

She has a lot of shame.

And I think many of us relate to that. She has a lot of masks up, because she’s frightened of showing her vulnerability.

Cut to the present, where Romanoff’s tormented memories of childhood have soured into bitterness. When all four family members reunite later in the film, there’s a distinct chilliness – of sublimated conflicts and repressed grievances – that Shortland drew from her own experiences to recreate authentically.

“I looked at my own family dysfunction,” she says. “When we’re with our families, we just go into this crazy pattern. It’s like Groundhog Day! Of reliving the time this happened, and the time that happened. Even if you’re not articulating it, it’s still percolating its way in the background. It’ll come out at Christmas, or a family barbecue.”

Of all the mysteries in the film – and there are a lot, from the resurrection of presumed-dead characters to the mind-control machinations of an evil Russian overlord – maybe the greatest one is Romanoff’s relationship with her family. Amid a web of betrayals and deceit, will she choose to trust again? Or will she remain the steely assassin, loyal to no-one?

BLACK WIDOW IS IN CINEMAS AND AVAILABLE VIA DISNEY+ WITH PREMIER ACCESS.

09 JUL 2021

THE FAMILY ROMANOFF

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CATE SHORTLAND ON SET WITH THE CAST

Such familial tensions have always run through Shortland’s films, albeit in more intimate settings.

In her feted debut feature Somersault (2004), a teenage girl flees her Canberra home, leaving her mother for a coming-of-age caper in the Snowy Mountains.

Meanwhile, Shortland’s follow-up Lore (2012) tracks the cross-country journey of five German siblings as they morally reckon with the aftermath of World War II. Black Widow, then, feels like a natural extension – just that this time round, the drama is blown up to (quite literally) life-or-death proportions.

When Shortland compares directing for Marvel to her previous efforts, most recently her psychological horror Berlin Syndrome (2017), she arrives at the same, assured themes: “Truth.

And power.

“The idea of ‘what is power?’” she elaborates.

“Who are we within that power structure? Who is Natasha Romanoff within the very staunch, difficult power structure that she finds herself?”

Of course, there’s all the bombast that’s par for the course by now with Marvel: namely the studio’s heavy reliance on special effects, which made Shortland realise “how difficult it is to create real universes out of the ether”.

And there’s the specific joy of seeing Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh sliding down escalators, scaling roofs and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting bystanders – a thrill that Shortland compares to a “fun fairground ride”.

Beneath the pomp, though, is a level of nuance that stakes Black Widow’s uniquely resonant place in the Marvel landscape. The complexity of the film’s human relationships, Shortland says, comes from her own father, who ran their family “like an army camp”.

“Dad was an orphan, so he didn’t know how to create a family. We all had to be like these little soldiers, my sisters and I. As we got older, it was quite hard to reveal your true self, and I think making films has allowed me to explore my own emotions in a really safe environment.

I understand why [my dad’s] like he is, and it’s helped me forgive.”

Over a fickle internet connection, a dog starts barking manically. Shortland apologises – “Barking at my daughter!” she laughs. It’s a reminder of who this film is ultimately for: her family.

“I want [my daughter] to be able to go into the cinema and invest in a character who is kicking ass, and who won’t back down,” she says. “You want to make films where people see themselves reflected.”

Smartening Up Writer-lawyer-academic Bri Lee’s new book takes aim at Australia’s education system, and the cycles of privilege embedded within it.

@wallendoug

Doug Wallen is a freelance writer and editor based in Victoria.

PHOTO BY DARCY STARR

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Books

Bri Lee

by Doug Wallen

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nspired by a revelatory visit to Oxford, where her friend is a Rhodes Scholar, Bri Lee began writing about the pursuit of intelligence. Intended as a companion to her book-length 2019 essay Beauty, which interrogated body image and self-worth, her planned piece Brains quickly outgrew the format of a personal essay. It became Who Gets to Be Smart, an ambitious interrogation of education and privilege told with Lee’s distinctive style of memoir-infused, issues-based reporting.

Suspicious of the way academia and other institutions maintain their authority by handing out tiered honours as something akin to “ornamental pots” – a phrase Virginia Woolf introduced in her landmark 1929 book A Room of One’s Own – Lee soon broadened her approach to look at inequality in school funding, Australia’s treatment of migrants, various means of testing intelligence and other entwined topics.

“When I got back to Australia and started seeing just how many problems of inequality [there] were at so many different levels,” says Lee over the phone from Sydney, “I realised I had to give it a proper full-book treatment.”

As in her multi-award-winning book Eggshell Skull, Lee makes a point of bringing the reader into her research, writing and even thought processes throughout Who Gets

closing the gap. Lee has found that issues of school funding have already attracted the most attention of anything in her far-reaching book, and that many parents have shared “shocking stories” with her about their own experiences navigating the current system.

“I’m gratified that people want to have that conversation,” Lee says. “People can’t believe how bad the system has gotten over the last 10 or 20 years. Obviously I’ve written about it because I wish it was more debated and discussed… We’re just not talking about it enough.”

As with the issue of widening wealth disparity, Australia’s educational divide is becoming increasingly pronounced.

In her book, Lee points to a 2018 OECD report that found it takes a poor person in Australia around four generations to reach average income, compared to two generations in Denmark and three in Sweden. She concludes that “‘social mobility’ is one of our nation’s great creation myths” and that not everyone gets a “fair go”.

“The data completely disproves [that],” she says, “but it’s such a core part of our story we tell ourselves. And the result is that we see poor people and say they ‘deserve’ to be there because they don’t work hard enough. And we see people at the top and presume they do deserve to be there. Both presumptions are just not based on evidence.”

Working on finishing the book as 2020 unfolded the way it did – with the pandemic’s exacerbation of longstanding inequality giving momentum to the Black Lives Matter movement, the vagaries of JobKeeper and the federal government’s continued depletion of university funding – Lee was able to straddle the eras before and during the pandemic in a way that echoed Eggshell Skull’s release during the height of the Me Too movement in Australia.

That quasi‑memoir, which is partly about how poorly Australia’s court systems handle sexual assault cases, also draws on her own experience in the legal system. She is now a non‑practising lawyer who has begun a PhD at the University of Sydney, looking at how Australia’s defamation laws hinder public-interest journalism.

Ever attuned to transparency, Lee notes that editing Who Gets to Be Smart was a painful process, since it forced her to revisit her misinformed beliefs and emotions from early on in the writing process. Rather than hide those shortcomings, she readily cites them.

“It would be lovely to believe that I never thought [those things],” she admits. “[But] that’s honesty, and being able to go on a journey of discovery with an author.”

WHO GETS TO BE SMART IS OUT NOW.

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to Be Smart. That means admitting to some personal flaws, such as her desire to be intelligent because she struggles with similarly coveted traits like patience and generosity.

Lee also admits to experiencing a “defensive spark” reaction that’s all too common when we encounter thinking from outside our chosen bubble of friends and peers, and shares a personal story about how a more expensive Catholic education helped to course-correct her struggling older brother.

“It’s just informed by the kind of reader I am,” says Lee of her style of reportage. “I’ve found myself growing more and more suspicious of non-fiction that isn’t clear about its subjectivity. So I hope to be as honest and as upfront as I can be, not just about my lens but also my potential blind spots and the angle from which I’m coming to these issues.”

Over the course of her thorough and often quite convincing book, Lee doggedly unpacks the disparities in education today, especially around the complicated topic of school funding. “There’s still so much that isn’t transparent or trackable for the average Australian,” she says. “It’s a very opaque area of policy and funding.”

The way private schools are awarded government funding at the moment, Lee says, ensures that rich and educated families will most likely remain that way, while the already disadvantaged are faced with ever-diminishing hopes of

09 JUL 2021

We see poor people and say they ‘deserve’ to be there because they don’t work hard enough. And we see people at the top and presume they do deserve to be there. Both presumptions are just not based on evidence.

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

PHOTO BY EBRU YILDIZ

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Music Lucy Dacus

by Leah Jing McIntosh

Leah Jing McIntosh is a critic, researcher and editor of Liminal. She recently edited Collisions: Fictions of the Future, out now with Pantera Press.

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ucy Dacus doesn’t write love songs. Or, if pressed, maybe “every song is a love song”. Or – “at least that’s a great sentence!” she laughs. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, the 26-year-old has recently moved to Philadelphia, and is video-calling from a corner of her office.

“I’ve never had a space that’s just mine to work in; it makes me feel like lots of things are possible in this room.”

This capacious sense of possibility is also present in Home Video, Dacus’ latest record. Her third album, Home Video is an intimate meditation on the complexities of relationships, a reminiscence charting her first love, her lost loves and her fierce friendships.

Though Home Video depicts her coming-of-age, Dacus has rarely spoken on how she came to music: “It’s because I have bad answers, so nobody likes them!” She never took music lessons, but she grew up singing. “Singing didn’t feel that much different from talking,” she says. “I feel like the real victory is that my parents just didn’t tell me to stop.”

Dacus’ previous record, Historian, ended on the image of two lovers writing down each other’s memories; Home Video opens with Dacus alone, weighed down by memory: “Being back here makes me hot in the face/Hot blood in my pulsing veins/Heavy memories weighing on my brain.”

With past melding into present, ‘Hot & Heavy’ sets the tone for the album, Dacus’ nostalgia for naivety striated with a gentle wisdom. “For me, Home Video is about learning that growing up is a process of unlearning things, and keeping what you want to keep,” she says.

Dacus has never strayed too far from memoir, yet she has often obfuscated her subjects, blurring their identities.

“I think that up until this point, I’ve been consciously or unconsciously protective of my personal life, and I haven’t

HOME VIDEO IS OUT NOW.

09 JUN 2021

Not one to shy away from memoir, Lucy Dacus gets confessional on her third record.

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Home Truths

wanted my songs to affect my actual relationships,” she says.

“I’ve always wanted to leave enough room that the person it’s about maybe wouldn’t know that it’s about them.”

With an intentionally confessional texture, Home Video offers a new intimacy. The song ‘Thumbs’ traces a memory of meeting a friend’s estranged father. Over gentle chords, Dacus sings softly, “I would kill him/If you let me/I would kill him/Quick and easy”. On ‘Christine’, she explains to her friend that she would “rather lose my dignity/than lose you” to a bad relationship. Dacus asked for permission from her friends to record the songs. “I haven’t had to do that before,” she reflects.

“I don’t write love songs…but I tend to write about my friends often. I have very intense, deep relationships.” Her friends and bandmates from supergroup boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, join on vocals for two songs. On ‘Going Going Gone’ they sing with Mitski and others. The end of the raw take is included, with Dacus telling the group, “I owe y’all whatever you ask from me, for the rest of my life.”

Dacus admits that she felt both more and less comfortable writing Home Video: “It felt a lot harder this time around.”

There are songs on the album for which she didn’t ask permission; ‘Brando’, about a lover she wishes would admit “you never knew me/like you thought you did”, and ‘Partner in Crime’, where, heart “pulpy” on her sleeve, she lies about her age to date an older man. In the latter, she thematises duplicity, warping her voice with autotune. She seems anxious over their reactions. “Maybe I’m wishing I had protected myself in the way I used to, but, I don’t know. I’m trying to not worry about it too much. My recent motto has been to not pre-plan my emotions,” she says.

The album ends with ‘Triple Dog Dare’, Dacus’ first song to overtly reference queer desire. The song ruminates on the homophobic consequences of crush: “Your mama read my poem/She wouldn’t tell me what it was she saw/But after that you weren’t allowed/To spend the night”.

Dacus says, “I feel like I hadn’t even really come out to myself that much when I was writing Historian. I think this is the first record that I feel comfortable publicly incorporating that into my identity.”

She finished writing ‘Triple Dog Dare’ in Melbourne in 2019, the first and last place she played it to a crowd. “I write a lot when I’m on tour because it feels like I’m nowhere…

I write on planes and on buses and vans and trains, because it feels like I don’t have to answer to anybody.”

In Home Video, Dacus answers only to herself. Distilling a bittersweet ache for past selves, on ‘First Time’ she wonders, “If I had paid closer attention/Maybe I could take us back to there and then”. Yet in her careful process of unlearning, she refuses to find herself mired in memory. She considers the impossibility of returning to the past, and instead looks forward with a shifting sense of hope: “The future isn’t worth its weight in gold/The future is a benevolent black hole”.

Film Reviews

Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb

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mbracing the link between moviegoing and dreaming, Australia’s prolific film collective Static Vision continues to spotlight overlooked cinematic treasures with its second mini‑festival, Dreamscapes. Fresh from delighting Sydney earlier this year, the festival takes over Melbourne’s Lido Cinemas this 15-18 July, with 15 features exploring “hopes, dreams and imagined worlds”. The bold program spans Australian premieres of recent international festival gems, such as the surreal indie thriller Slow Machine, starring Chloë Sevigny, and Searchers, a multifaceted documentary portrait of online dating, through to outré retrospective screenings. There’s Paprika, the 2006 Japanese animated classic said to have inspired Christopher Nolan’s Inception, as well as True Stories (1986), Talking Heads singer David Byrne’s characteristically kooky Texas road trip directorial debut.

As well as imagining the future, movies can illuminate our past. Cinema from the 1980s – so often disparaged – gets a welcome reappraisal in critic Michael Koresky’s sweet new book, Films of Endearment. The cine-memoir intertwines a mother and son’s shared love for the decade’s big emotional dramas, particularly those with captivating female leads, such as 9 to 5 (1980), Aliens (1986) and Crossing Delancey (1988). Koresky warmly maps how each movie speaks to events in his mother’s life, at the same time as he honours an era when female actors strode to the fore of Hollywood storytelling. ABB

BYRNING DOWN THE...

HIGHWAY

LITTLE JOE 

From the perversely fecund soil in The Little Shop of Horrors grew a plant that fed on blood. Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s latest film, a clinically stylish psychological horror with a Black Mirror-esque sci-fi bent, posits a plant that feeds on one’s identity. This little bloom – a shock of bright red stamen dubbed “Little Joe”, named after the son of dedicated senior plant breeder Alice (Emily Beecham, herself crowned by a coiffed shock of bright red) – is engineered to emit a scent that triggers the production of oxytocin, to generate happiness. But of course, there are some unforeseen side effects: those who inhale its pollen – the adolescent Joe (Kit Connor) among them, and Alice’s awkward colleague Chris (a brittle Ben Whishaw) – seem to change subtly, not least in the way they become creepily concerned with safeguarding the plant. Push aside the troubling, barely coded anti-pharmaceutical message, and give in to the intoxicating, Kubrickian chill of Little Joe. KEVA YORK PERFUMES

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She is a stand-offish professional living a friendless life.

He is a shabby chauffer, desperately clinging to his job so that he can rent a bigger flat and get shared custody of his daughter. It’s a solid set-up for a rom-com, but Perfumes avoids the clichés to create something special.

As Guillaume the driver, the charismatic Grégory Montel (Call My Agent) walks a fine line; he’s just enough of a screw-up to make his struggles believable, and just street smart enough to be useful to Anne (Emmanuelle Devos). As a “nose” – a one-time professional perfumer whose sense of smell is so acute that she’s in constant demand to help replicate and conceal odours – her job is intriguing, while her attempts to overcome a recent setback peel back her otherwise frosty facade to reveal some charming, all-too-human flaws. Perfumes is neither a romance nor much of a comedy, but it has the engaging tone of both movie-worlds. Anne and Guillaume are a great couple; time with them is time well spent. ANTHONY MORRIS

HERSELF 

The term “kitchen sink drama” is wrought literal in this Irish tear-jerker about construction, destruction and the manifold ways one can make a home. Co-writer Clare Dunne stars as Sandra, a single mum juggling menial jobs and shared custody of her young daughters while living in crisis accommodation. With a view to securing permanent digs, she and a crew of kindly acquaintances spend the summer building a tiny home and, with it, a tight-knit community. Having escaped partner violence (depicted in visceral flashbacks; go gently), Sandra’s fractured memory rebuilds itself in tandem with the house – a warm, if unsubtle symbol of safety, stability, love. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!), Herself treads a largely familiar path, hampered by tonal swings. It doesn’t always hit the nail on the head, but generous performances from Dunne, Dame Harriet Walter (Sense and Sensibility) and the charismatic little lass Ruby Rose O’Hara give it a sturdy foundation, and some natural light.

AIMEE KNIGHT

Small Screen Reviews

Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight

PHYSICAL  | APPLE TV+

YOU DON’T NOMI

 | INSTAGRAM + FACEBOOK FROM 14 JULY

 | DVD + VOD

From the creators of Bachelor spoof The Housemate (ABC iview), The Power of the Dream is a short-form mockumentary comedy series following “cousin-best-friends” Amy (Alexandra Keddie) and Brooke (Bobbie-Jean Henning) Bland, who dream of competing at the Tokyo Olympics. Decked out in matching green and gold tracksuits, with nail polish in the colours of the Olympic rings, a cat named Susie O’Neill, and support from the gold-medallist herself, what the duo lack in talent – or athletic ability – they make up for in passion. Although the web series doesn’t add anything new to the mockumentary form, it’s an enjoyable look into not only the (ahem) power of a dream, but also the power of supportive female friendship, and the belief that women and girls can do anything (ultimately, it’s not their lack of skill that doesn’t get them to the Games, but the pandemic). In a work named in honour of a Celine Dion power ballad, Keddie and Henning display great commitment, making this fun, bite-sized viewing. CLAIRE WHITE

In Paul Verhoeven’s legendarily vulgar Showgirls (1995), everything is about sex, except sex: sex is about power. But who’s on top? This documentary examines the so-bad-it’s-fabulous classic for its camp value and potential feminist politics, tracing the line between exploitation and empowerment.

What it lacks is proximity to the film’s creators, instead making witty use of clips and voiceover: from the critics, converts and queer superfans who have given Showgirls its renaissance as genius subversion of the wholesome American musical. Just when you’re convinced that Verhoeven’s obsession with sexual assault is totally tasteless, there is loving testimony from a performer in the unofficial Showgirls musical parody, who says that the critical flop allowed her to reclaim selfhood after her own rape. As with most cult appraisals, anyone who’s not already a friend of Nomi – the titular stripper turned showgirl – should check out the original film beforehand, but if you’re familiar: don your finest “Versayce”, break out the doggy chow and prepare to thrust it. ELIZA JANSSEN

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his is a skill I don’t use enough,” says Gwen Goode (Grace Palmer, Shortland Street) as she puts the finishing touches on a Windsor knot.

“Maybe because I’m not Avril Lavigne.”

The niche barb makes me laugh out loud: a peppermint‑tea spit-take thanks to Palmer’s deadpan delivery, and despite the wider goings-on. Gwen is sprucing up a corpse for her first service at Loving Tributes, the funeral home she and her sister Ellie (Eve Palmer) just inherited from their recently departed grandfather. This is the premise of Good Grief, a darkly comic six-part series from New Zealand, co-written by the Palmer sisters and partially inspired by their mum’s experience of dressing a deceased relative.

As you’ve probably already guessed, Good Grief is not for the faint of heart. Its opening minutes are streaked with blood and vomit.

Shortly thereafter, the mismatched siblings – Ellie, all buttoned-up and responsible; Gwen, a firebrand aspiring DJ – crash a stranger’s memorial service in the name of market research. But if the farcical physical comedy doesn’t make you giggle, perhaps Ellie letting slip the c-word in a school playground will.

The Palmer siblings’ natural chemistry and charisma are undeniable.

With a supporting cast of similarly idiosyncratic weirdos – whose services Gwen and Ellie inherit as part and parcel of the family business – Good Grief is a deliciously sacrilegious workplace sitcom (a subgenre that seems to be ever-expanding). Now streaming on SBS on Demand. AK

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POWER OF THE DREAM

GOODE TIMES

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The opening scenes in Physical are instrumental in understanding writer Annie Weisman’s (Desperate Housewives) new show: there is no-one Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) hates more than herself. A disenfranchised housewife with an eating disorder and a chauvinistic husband, Danny (Rory Scovel), Sheila moves through the world with an eviscerating, near constant internal monologue focused both on herself and others. After being let go from the “bourgeois academic ladder”, Danny contemplates a life in politics while Sheila discovers her higher purpose in life: aerobics. There is deep nuance and complexity in the characterisations – Danny has surprisingly redemptive moments, while the oppressed yet mercenary Sheila casts people aside once she’s done with them. Set against a jaunty, nostalgic 80s soundtrack with a strong supporting cast, Physical has whiffs of On Becoming a God in Central Florida and GLOW. Traversing potentially triggering terrain, from mental illness and sexual abuse to loss of faith and poverty, Physical unpeels the layers of sunny San Diego to reveal something much darker. SONIA NAIR

Music Reviews

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Isabella Trimboli Music Editor

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or over two decades, indie rock band Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and up until recently, drummer Janet Weiss) have constantly recalibrated their sound without forfeiting any of the elements that made them so visceral and beloved: sarcasm, aggressive guitars and piercing, perfect howls. As critic Jenn Pelly wrote for Pitchfork in 2014, “The friction of their overlapping voices – Brownstein’s monotone speak-sing anchoring Tucker’s wild vibrato – had an ecstatic, unusual beauty.”

The Woods (2005) – arguably their greatest album – heralded the end of the group, but 10 years later the trio came back with No Cities to Love (2015). The St Vincent‑produced The Center Won’t Hold (2019) followed, which saw the band’s jagged and forceful riffs coated in sleek pop production. Ahead of its release, Janet Weiss left the group.

Path of Wellness, their first album without Weiss since 1997, and the first record the band have produced themselves, is a stripped and unadorned album, one that places Brownstein and Tucker’s combative vocals at its core. But the pair seem lost and lethargic, trudging through a set of songs that try to capture our current turmoil, with mixed results. It’s the first real misstep of their career. One hopes that they can rediscover the ecstatic energy and caustic humour that made them so potent to begin with. IT

SLE ATE R-K INN EY: TOO FAR FRO M THE WOO DS

@itrimboli

DEUCE DEUCE 

There’s something achingly intimate, almost voyeuristic, about listening to music made by romantic partners. With Deuce, Melbourne’s Curtis Wakeling (The Ocean Party, Pop Filter) and visual artist Kayleigh Heydon have turned their romantic partnership into a creative one, delivering 10 languid tracks of dreamy pop that encapsulate the strangeness of life in lockdown. The record traverses two sounds: the jangle‑pop “striped sunlight sound”, and the slacker “dolewave” sound of beloved local bands such as Dick Diver. Songs like ‘Heat Wave’ and ‘Day Three’ fall into the former camp, while ‘Language of Love’, with its plodding bassline and Wakeling’s almost monotone delivery, takes on the classic Melbourne sound. It’s impressive that this is Heydon’s first musical outing – the artist’s silky-smooth vocals echo dream-pop mainstays such as Beach House, providing a lovely foil to Wakeling’s deeper register. Wakeling, too, is trying new things – this is his first foray into mixing, and as a result the album has a rawer vibe that feels more personal. Fusing love, life and music, Deuce is a cosy balm. GISELLE AU-NHIEN NGUYEN

BLACK METAL 2 DEAN BLUNT

BLUE WEEKEND WOLF ALICE

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Seven years after the success of Black Metal, Dean Blunt’s follow-up Black Metal 2 offers further insight into the enigmatic Londonbased artist’s mutable, scattered sound. His songs plunge into discomfort and modern malaise, with stark lyrics on grief, addiction, love and selfhood. Despite singing exclusively in a despondent monotone, Blunt manages to capture a wide spectrum of emotions on Black Metal 2. Moments of frankness and dark theatricalism – like ‘MUGU’ and ‘LA RAZA’ – recall the horror-indebted songs of Memphis hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia. On ‘SKETAMINE’, Blunt evokes the beach scene in Albert Camus’ existentialist masterpiece The Stranger, with a staggered narrative (“Girl, come see what’s up/With a gun on the beach/If you see what I mean”) accompanied by hazy harmonica, strings and guitars.

By resisting categorisation, the album through both lyric and sound becomes an exercise in accepting the infinite meaning and therefore meaninglessness of all things.

Four years after cementing their place in the world of indie rock with Mercury Awardwinning Visions of a Life (2017), Wolf Alice return with Blue Weekend, a record that both expands upon and perfects their unique melding of 90s grunge and elegiac dream pop. From opening track ‘The Beach’ – an expertly calibrated, tension-wracked slowburn – it becomes abundantly clear this is the work of a supremely confident band.

When moving between the righteous growls of ‘Smile’ (“Wind her up and this honey-bee stings!” yells lead singer Ellie Roswell) to the Cocteau Twins-esque melodies that swirl around ‘Safe from Heartbreak (If You Never Fall in Love)’, one senses not artistic strain, but rather an unbridled and defiantly creative curiosity. Even better? This curiosity is backed up with craft. The end result is an album that feels delicately arranged yet never stuffy, diverse in sound but singular in vision.

The kind of blockbuster, indie-rock opus that used to be common, but nowadays feels increasingly rare. LUKE MCCARTHY

OLIVIA BENNETT

Book Reviews

Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on

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HEAVEN MIEKO KAWAKAMI

THE RAIN HERON ROBBIE ARNOTT

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Following her celebrated 2020 novel Breasts and Eggs, Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami delivers an intimate, often upsetting study of bullying. Narrated by a 14-year-old who’s viciously mocked and attacked due to his lazy eye, Heaven follows the boy’s growing bond with a fellow outcast from his class. The pair strike up a secret correspondence via letters, comparing notes on divorce and other shared traumas. Set in 1991, the book doesn’t touch on the modern threat of cyberbullying, but that doesn’t make the students’ brutality any less shocking. The sudden bouts of violence stand out all the more against the story’s otherwise quiet, thoughtful vibe. There’s reason enough to stick with these beleaguered characters, who experience intense feelings of powerlessness and even suicidal ideation. Highlighting the role of shame at home and in school, Kawakami observes the way friendship can protect us from the outside world and how personal transformation can show us a way forward – especially when undergone in tandem with a kindred spirit. DOUG WALLEN

The rain heron is made of water and yet it can still be caged.

Confused? Don’t worry, you’ll just have to trust the writer; he’ll deliver, because much like this strange creature, Robbie Arnott’s second novel is a thing of wonder and beauty.

It doesn’t all have to make sense. The bird’s magical powers become the reason why a team of soldiers are obsessed with its capture. What nefarious actions they will do with it if found remain unspoken. Arnott’s imagination takes flight in this fantastical story that mixes hard-edged realism and poetic fable. The very best of Arnott’s prose describes the natural beauty of the unnamed region but his interweaving of the tales of three women who are, in different ways, affected by the rain heron is masterful.

The Rain Heron is a both a thriller and a dystopian novel. Evocative and violent, its separate but connected narratives will keep you intrigued to the end. THUY ON

ECHOLALIA BRIOHNY DOYLE

PHOTO BY BRETT RAWLINGS PHOTOGRAPHY



Briohny Doyle’s emotive and mournful second novel, Echolalia, takes us into the life of a family falling apart. Emma Cormac, who has married into a seemingly perfect life, sits inside her palatial designer home in Shorehaven with her three young children, and is regularly visited by her hostile mother-in-law Pat – the matriarch of Emma’s busy husband’s powerful and well-connected housing-developer family. As the lake vista beyond the gleaming windows of Emma’s home evaporates, and the birds vanish due to the harsh effects of climate change, Emma too is disintegrating – struggling to inhabit a life that doesn’t fit her, and with declining mental health – which leads ultimately to an unthinkable act against her small boy Robbie. Doyle’s writing is powerful, and she expertly shifts the narrative between Before and After this tragic event, exploring trauma, intergenerational grief and questions of morality with great skill. Echolalia is masterful storytelling.

MANDY BEAUMONT

09 JUL 2021

TH UY

37

FA RE W EL L

his will be my last column as books editor for The Big Issue. Yes, it’s hard to believe but I’ve been writing, commissioning and editing all things books for the last eight years (and my association with the magazine goes way back to 1996). It’s very sad to say farewell but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in the time I’ve been here. Under my stewardship the books pages have become more inclusive. I don’t believe we should only cover highbrow literary novels, because frankly we all need variety, and having a rich and sometimes stodgy diet is not good for anyone. So a range of books are featured in these pages, including genre, picture books and YA offerings, by writers ranging from Sydney poet Eileen Chong to celebrated children’s author Jackie French, AM. I’ve been a voracious reader ever since I learned how the building blocks of letters translate into story, and my professional life over the last two decades (and counting) has evolved around language: as a critic, a poet and an editor, but most of all, as a reader. It’s been an honour and a delight to be at the helm of these pages for such a long time. Thank you for being supportive of the reviews, interviews and features therein. For anyone who’s interested in following what I’m up to, check Twitter (@thuy_on). For now, I bid you adieu and happy reading! TO

Public Service Announcement

by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus

I got a coffee from the bicycle-themed cafe and went for a walk to the beach. I thought up 17 reasons to “justify” this walk on the beach. I needed the exercise. I needed to make a phone call. I could go past the shops and pick up a few things we needed for dinner. But really, you never need an excuse to go to the beach.

So I’m on the beach and already life is better. The sand makes your legs feel different, have you noticed?

The light bounces off the sea directly onto your face.

It’s all very pretty. I hadn’t made my phone call yet. It didn’t feel respectful. I just walked for a bit, in silence, looking at the winter sun belting off the water, watching the way those lazy waterbirds drag their legs behind them along the surface of the water when they take off.

Then something happened that doesn’t usually happen in my everyday experience of life. A fin emerged from the water. I wasn’t sure, at first, that I’d seen it, so I kept my eyes on it. Sure enough, out came the fin again. In a matter of moments it was quite clear what I was witnessing: no less than four dolphins actually frolicking in the water. Leaping out across each other, having a real belter of a Monday morning. Did I have someone with me to gasp at? I did not! Had I the forethought to get my phone out of my pocket and take a video? I did not! Those of you who live near beaches are probably rolling your eyes at me but just so you

know: this is not a normal part of most people’s days.

I subsequently passed a woman on the beach who said, faintly, “Oh yes, we’ve had them visit quite a bit lately.”

This fact occurred to me this morning: other people’s everyday experiences are not mine.

I have a friend who has a whole cupboard full of tea drawers. Tiny little 6cm square wooden drawers full of tea-leaves, each labelled with words like Oolong and Sweet Peach. When you have tea at my friend’s house you have it dangled in a little tea-cage into a fine cup.

There’s a process that involves waiting and watching the steam rise from the water and I swear the steam never rises quite so gracefully at my place, and the tea doesn’t taste quite so decadent.

Other places don’t have the same sounds either. The silence is always thicker when you go some place where you can clearly see the stars at night.

Sometimes you can change your day by walking a different way to work. Side streets and houses you never noticed.

I used to work with someone who would sit at the lunch table listening to a workmate read the general knowledge quiz from the newspaper. She would start the quiz with an apple in her hand and would slowly slice incredibly thin slices from it as the quiz progressed. The way this woman sliced an apple, well I can’t even tell you. We all started doing it. We started pitching in for those big bags of apples so we’d have a fruit bowl from which we could all pluck a perfect apple to slice thoughtfully while we listened to the quiz.

By the time I left that office, there were people slicing apples while doing the quiz who had never met Apple Woman. It was handed down through work generations.

Public Service Announcement: you’re only in your life. You’re only seeing your bit! Turn a few pages over.

Visit a beach. Ask someone to make you tea. People and places are different, even the ones you think you know.

Lorin Clarke is a Melbourne-based writer. The second season of her radio series, The Fitzroy Diaries, is on ABC Radio National and the ABC Listen app now.

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I

went somewhere different today. Not very different. Didn’t fly overseas. Didn’t get off a plane and step into a completely different culture, aware suddenly of every tonal nuance, noticing the light and the sound and how people look at you differently. I drove for half an hour to deliver something somewhere slightly unfamiliar. I thought maybe there would be slight differences. Different shops. Maybe a nice bookshop I’d never seen. A cafe that had a different personality, like those ones that have a wheelbarrow out the front with flowers growing in it, or something. Well, yes, this place had a bookshop. It also had a cafe with an inconsistent and inexplicable bicycle theme. And it had a beach. Public Service Announcement: sometimes a little bit different is just different enough.

09 JUL 2021

Higher Porpoise

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas

40

PHOTOS BY LAWRENCE FURZEY

Tastes Like Home Nathan Lyons

Curried Sausages 1 large onion 2 apples ¼ cup vegetable oil 8 beef sausages 1 tablespoon Keen’s curry powder 1 tablespoon plain flour 2 cups chicken stock ¼ cup raisins 1 cup sliced green beans 2 tablespoons cream Salt and pepper, to taste

Method Peel onion and slice.

Peel, core and cut each apple into 8 wedges.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in ya big old favourite saucepan over medium heat. Chuck the sausages in and brown all over, remove and set aside. Slice up the sausages.

Add the remaining oil to the pan and cook onion, stirring for 3 minutes or until slightly softened. Stir in curry powder and flour, mix well. Slowly pour in stock, stirring until sauce boils and thickens. Toss apples, raisins and sausages into the pan and bring to the boil.

Lower heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Stir in beans and cream, cook for 5 minutes.

Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

SH AR E PLAN TO RECREATE THIS DISH AT HOME? TAG US WITH YOUR CREATION! @BIGISSUEAUSTRALIA #TASTESLIKEHOME.

Nathan says…

C

urried sausages are a classic family favourite – and definitely a favourite among my kids.

Thick rich gravy and delicious vegetables, preferably served with buttery, fluffy mashed potato, just the way Mum made it.

Curried sausages bring back so many memories. Sitting with the cousins, listening to Charlie Pride while eating dinner and being yelled at by my aunty to eat all our food.

She slaved over the oven all day to make us dinner.

Growing up, it was a staple meal in our household and for all my relatives as well. It’s one of those meals many people across our community remember having – and still have regularly. This is one of those recipes that has been handed down through the generations.

This dish consists of beef sausages simmered with onions and vegetables in a mouth-watering gravy made from curry powder and chicken stock. Curry powder is a must for every Indigenous household. It’s a popular dinner recipe in Australia and the UK probably because of its milder savoury flavour – it’s not a hot curry. Every family has their own level of spiciness and personal touch, whether it’s apples or sultanas.

Today my kids enjoy the same recipe I was taught by my uncles and aunties. It’s a cheap and simple meal to make, and it’s one of those recipes that can be changed up to suit the fussiest eater. A simple way I change it up is to use pork, lamb, chicken or kangaroo sausages instead. And there are many versions of this recipe, where the sausages are boiled or fried in the pan, sliced or whole. This can also be done in a slow cooker, and can be frozen for a later date.

Classic curried sausages is the one meal the community, my family and I always have and always enjoy. I look forward to the day I can make this for my grandchildren.

It doesn’t matter where I am in Australia, when this recipe is made it brings together the mob, and mob means home even if I’m not on my own Country.

KOOKING WITH A KOORI BY NATHAN LYONS IS OUT NOW.

09 JUL 2021

Serves 4-6

41

Ingredients

Puzzles

ANSWERS PAGE 45.

By Lingo!

by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com CONCRETE

CLUES 5 letters Beneath Derision Exact copy Join up Recluse 6 letters Bowdlerise Little lump Not purchased Roman magistrate Speaks monotonously 7 letters Advise Vibrate 8 letters Tightly fought (hyphenated)

S C D U N

L

R O E

Sudoku

by websudoku.com

Each column, row and 3 x 3 box must contain all numbers 1 to 9.

5 4 3 6 7 1

6 4 4 5 5

1

8

7

1

8

7 2

1 6

6 9

3 6

8 6 9 7

Puzzle by websudoku.com

Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Cameron 5 Capulet 9 Nicks 10 Inspector

11 Press the flesh 13 Speedy 16 Dogecoin 18 In camera 19 Blocks 24 Get the picture 26 Handshake 27 Alike 28 Buskers 29 Destroy

DOWN 1 Canapés 2 Machete 3 Roses 4 Neighs 5 Cash flow 6 Piecemeal 7 Latch 8 Terse 12 Link 14 Pint 15 Demitasse 17 Archways 20 Courier 21 Scenery 22 Spread 23 Rehab 24 Genus 25 Class

20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 Shelley Long 2 The Gulf of Mexico 3 True 4 Five 5 1995 6 A player scoring two goals in one game 7 Six 8 The feeling of having experienced something before in a dream 9 Harry says she accepted a ride from him in the 1970s 10 HG Nelson and Rampaging Roy Slaven 11 Britain 12 A 13 Kate Hudson 14 The Human League 15 Air 16 Lauren Jackson 17 Breast cancer 18 The then largest and smallest British coins 19 India Pale Ale 20 Typhoid Mary

09 JUL 2021

Using all nine letters provided, can you answer these clues?

Every answer must include the central letter.

Plus, which word uses all nine letters?

by puzzler.com

43

Word Builder

The Latin word concretus referred to something hardened, stiff or congealed. This solidity is how the word was borrowed into English in the early 1500s to talk about things that are physical rather than abstract. The word can be broken down as con+crete, literally “grow together”. That’s the same con- “with” that turns up in concert, congeal and confer, and the same crete “grow” that turns up in crescendo, accrue and decrease. In the 1800s concrete was first used to refer to the mixture of sand, gravel and other materials that would be mixed together with cement to create a solid building material.

Cement is from the Latin cæmenta, which originally referred to the small stones that were crushed to make the cement.

by Chris Black

Quick Clues

THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME. ANSWERS PAGE 43.

2

3

9

4

5

6

7

8

10

11 12 13

14

15

16

DOWN

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

25

26

27

28

29

Cryptic Clues ACROSS

DOWN

1 Cancel half-mushy peas as fancy starters (7) 2 Knife revolutionary in China (7) 3 Friends character got close to Phoebe

without love? (7) Mac (5)

10 Monitor popular, disgraced record producer (9) 11 Massage and shake hands (5,3,5) 13 Hasty agent took drugs with Democrat (6) 16 Go do nice work for currency (8) 18 Private placement for American (2,6) 19 Shepherds make second-rate rugby players (6) 24 Understand acquisition of oil? (3,3,7) 26 Gives fish in greeting (9) 27 Somewhat formal Ikea uniform (5) 28 Players found along the way? (7) 29 Demolish and remove walls of Odesa’s

Old Town (7)

1 Appetisers (7) 2 Big knife (7) 3 Flowers (5) 4 Equine noises (6) 5 Money going in and out of business (4,4) 6 In fits and starts (9) 7 Fastening (5) 8 Curt (5) 12 Connect (4) 14 Imperial measure (4) 15 Small cup (9) 17 Curved structures (8) 20 Delivery person (7) 21 Part of theatrical set (7) 22 Disseminate (6) 23 Treatment for addiction (5) 24 Taxonomic category (5) 25 Taxonomic category (5)

Solutions

1 Director of romance flick? (7) 5 Romeo’s not one to wildly copulate 9 Reportedly cancel member of Fleetwood

ACROSS

1 Director of Titanic (7) 5 Montague rival (7) 9 Steals (5) 10 Policeman in England (9) 11 Shake hands (like a politician) (5,3,5) 13 Express (6) 16 Cryptocurrency (8) 18 Privately (2,6) 19 Impedes (6) 24 See the light (3,3,7) 26 Greeting (9) 27 Similar (5) 28 Street performers (7) 29 Obliterate (7)

with flowers (5) 4 Stable reports hinges need fixing? (6) 5 Spooner’s fancy business abbreviation for money movement (4,4) 6 Tapas not delivered all at once? (9) 7 Secure the French church after first sign of trouble (5) 8 Short reset failed (5) 12 Couple of lovers’ first tattoo (4) 14 Quiet at home? Time for beer (4) 15 Spilled tea, missed cup (9) 17 Entrances with cunning methods (8) 20 He delivered messages and he returned? (7) 21 Screen’s flickering with unknown background (7) 22 Arranged drapes for magazine feature (6) 23 He went into bar... turned up here? (5) 24 Type of irregular green bugs (5) 25 Conservative girl is kind (5)

SUDOKU PAGE 43

2 5 6 8 7 1 9 3 4

8 4 3 6 9 5 7 2 1

1 7 9 2 3 4 5 6 8

6 9 1 4 5 2 3 8 7

4 2 7 9 8 3 1 5 6

3 8 5 7 1 6 2 4 9

9 6 2 5 4 7 8 1 3

7 3 4 1 2 8 6 9 5

5 1 8 3 6 9 4 7 2

Puzzle by websudoku.com

WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Under Scorn Clone Enrol Loner 6 Censor Nodule Unsold Consul Drones 7 Counsel Resound 8 Close-run 9 Scoundrel

09 JUL 2021

1

45

Crossword

Click 1937

Roger Lapébie and train, Tour de France

words by Michael Epis photo by Getty

46

THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU

R

oger Lapébie won the Tour de France in 1937 – with a little help from a train.

The Frenchman (in front, above) was leading the 16th stage when he crossed train tracks – after which other riders, including the overall leader and reigning champion, Belgium’s Sylvère Maes, had to wait for the train to pass.

It was the final straw for Maes (closest to Lapébie, above) who promptly quit the race, taking his Belgian team with him. The rivalry between Belgian and French riders was strong, and remains so today. Of the 107 editions of the Tour, French teams or riders have won 36 times; Belgians come second, with 18 victories.

Maes was already unhappy with the 90-second penalty given to Lapébie the day before – for holding onto cars when going uphill, riding in their draft downhill and being pushed along by spectators – saying it was less than the time Lapébie had gained. One of the spectators who pushed Lapébie did not admit it for more than 50 years.

He was Félix Lévitan – future Tour director.

Lapébie suffered too – when he set out on the day he was penalised he found his bike vandalised. The handlebars were replaced – but without a water‑bottle

holder, so he set off up the Pryénées without so much as a drink.

At the time, 1937 was the most scandalous edition of the race, but the scandals got worse. In 1967 British rider Tom Simpson died on an ascent – amphetamines were found in his back pocket. And Lance Armstrong’s seven titles were struck from the record books once his drug-cheating was proven. Cheating was rife from the first Tour in 1903, which included night racing – when officials couldn’t see a thing. Cheating was so bad the next year that the headline in the sponsoring newspaper was “The End”.

The Tour was in fact started to boost newspaper circulation. L’Auto was running a poor second to Le Vélo, and decided it needed a promotional event – hence the Tour. It did the job: within five years, circulation increased tenfold to 250,000, and Le Vélo was out of business.

In a wonderful irony, almost on the level of a Melbourne swimming pool being named after drowned prime minister Harold Holt, there is a beautiful bike track in France named after Lapébie – and it runs along a disused train track.

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09 JULY 2020